I often come across posts where the title has been incorrectly modified to include a home-made [solved] tag. Where this edit has been made, often the solution has been added as an addendum to the question, rather than the OP adding a self-answer.

Where this happens, I used to ask OPs to roll back their edit and re-post an answer, but most of these requests were unheeded, and I suspect a proportion of new users would not see the point of the clean Q&A separation we like here.

I thus started to do this myself, and would do the following. I would roll back the OP's question to the last good question state, and then take their answer text, and post it as a Community Wiki answer, with the following prefix:

(Posted solution on behalf of the OP).

[Answer pasted here]

For the avoidance of doubt, the quote block is to show it here, and I don't use a quote block in practice. I've been doing this for several years and have only just received a suggestion that I need to post these differently. Where I post these, I sometimes suggest to the OP that if they wish to re-post the CW answer under their own name, I will delete my copy (perhaps one or two have done so).

However, a high-rep user recently edited one such post to a format they believed did not violate the attribution guidelines, so the new post format was:

The following was written by the question author, (name & link), in revision (revision link) of the question.

[Answer pasted here]

Thus, their answer included the author's name, the author's profile page link, a link to the revision where I made the edit, and the answer was added in a large quote block below the introductory paragraph.

My interlocutor added this in a comment:

If you leave out the author's name, the link to the content, and don't properly indicate that quoted content is a quotation, then you are not only meeting the site's definition of plagiarism, but violating the site's CC-BY-SA licence by not properly attributing content, making it a copyright violation. If you don't have the time to appropriately cite some content, then don't copy the content. Just deciding to not properly cite content isn't appropriate.

I replied that I felt this was too much work, given that I made it clear that it belonged to the "OP", and they replied again:

You disagree that it's a problem for you to plagiarize content and violate other people's copyright rights? That's...just not okay. Again, if you think it's too much of a burden on you to not plagiarize content when copying other people's content then don't post the content. The site's licence and legal page (as well as the help center page on plagiarism) are quite explicit in what is required.

Now, whilst I agree with the spirit of attribution guidelines (e.g. to disallow the stealing of other people's answers in order to acquire rep from their work) I think this interpretation is a bit overblown. Furthermore, adding an answer in a large quote block feels rather over-formatted to me, and makes it less readable than posting it as if the OP had done so.

I admire the purism of my interlocutor's interpretation of the guidelines, and I say that knowing I can be a bit of an OCD stickler myself. However, I think my having moved ~410 such answers into the right place, and foregone any rep points for having done so, is significantly better than giving up this sort of edit because the posting requirements are too onerous.

I would therefore like to ask the community if this interpretation of the attribution guidelines is widespread, and thus whether I should stop edits of this kind, given that adding other bits and pieces is not only a fiddle, but swamps answers with irrelevant material. What do you reckon? I am happy to defer to popular opinion here.


Whilst I am looking for community answers here, both for and against the strict interpretation of the attribution guidelines, it occurs to me just now that Stack Overflow might like to give an answer themselves. I would very much welcome that too.

| |
  • 8
    Doing this the way the site license says it should be done is the most obvious way to avoid "Hey, you are doing it wrong" comments. If you don't care for the rulez then just leave it up to somebody else to fix the problem. – Hans Passant Sep 22 '17 at 17:31
  • 7
    @Hans: I do care for the rules, but I also care where they are being over-applied, which I think applies here for the reasons I've given. I think my having done all that editing work should clearly trump this technicality. – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 17:36
  • 2
    So you want a link to throw back into the commenter's face? Well, glad I didn't help. Just ignore the comment if you think you are justified doing this. – Hans Passant Sep 22 '17 at 17:47
  • 15
    @Hans: erm, I am a bit taken aback by your hostility, Hans. Have I offended you in the past in some fashion? As stated, I want the community's opinion, and I plan to abide by the majority view. Is it wrong that I should want to get views about this from Meta? – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 17:50
  • 4
    Stack Overflow Attribution Rules I think minimally rule 4 should apply here. It is possible for the OP's name to be removed from the question, either by being made a community wiki the account being deleted. Unlikely but possible. So the user name should appear and be linked in the repost of the answer. Also, I think your wording could be more explicit that you're quoting the OP. – BSMP Sep 22 '17 at 18:51
  • @BSMP: ok, thanks. Would you post that as an answer? If you can expand on it by way of justification that would be ideal. For example, if I say "OP", people will know that the Original Poster's name and profile can be found in their question, so I'd be interested in why that is unclear. (For the avoidance of doubt, I am not insisting I am correct here, just digging a bit further to understand your view, and to stimulate other community responses). If you'd like to suggest a better introductory paragraph in your answer also, I'd welcome that. – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 19:16
  • 1
    (As food for thought, I recall I did have one OP whose English was poor, and who had not encountered the acronym "OP" before, and they asked me what it meant. However, I am not sure that category of poster would be much inclined to insist on their copyright rights anyway, so...) – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 19:19
  • In the past I have just rolled back the edit that introduced the solution to the question and posted a comment saying that if the OP would like to post their solution, they should use the answer box below. – user4639281 Sep 23 '17 at 0:17
  • @TinyGiant: yeah, that's one approach worth drawing attention to. I wonder if that might be misinterpreted as unhelpful though (and I say that as someone who has received a great deal of frustration from new users over the years as a result of their not understanding our editing culture). – halfer Sep 23 '17 at 0:19
  • 6
    All moderation is seen as unhelpful by someone. I really don't care whether a given OP considers my advice helpful or not. The fact of the matter is that the solution doesn't belong in the question, and I don't care to navigate the waters of plagiarism and attribution for someone who doesn't care that answers don't belong in questions. If someone wants to share their solution with others, they can do so using the means provided for them as expected by the community following the guidelines set out by the community they intend to interact with. – user4639281 Sep 23 '17 at 0:21
  • 3
    @halfer: This is why I don't use the term OP anymore; instead, I use terms like "asker" or "question author". – BoltClock Sep 23 '17 at 8:30
  • 2
    @Tiny Giant: What about xkcd.com/979? We don't live in a perfect world, we live in a world where the reality is that our self-answering process isn't intuitively obvious to some people (even if you and I agree the concept of questions and answers should be obvious to everybody), and so whenever somebody inadvertently posts their solution in the wrong place, we have to make do with what little control we have of the situation, since we obviously can't make somebody do things the right way. – BoltClock Sep 23 '17 at 8:31
  • @BoltClock I don't see your point. There's nothing preventing the author from following the directions I would have left in the comment below their question, and if not, it probably isn't a huge loss. – user4639281 Sep 23 '17 at 15:30

My take? You don't need to be so explicit with attribution when it is immediately obvious who the originator of the content you are quoting is. Every answer is associated with a question, and on Stack Overflow every question has an author, even if that author is anonymous (i.e. has neither an identifiable name nor a profile link). For this reason, it is sufficient to refer to the question author as exactly that: "the question author".

This also accounts for the scenario of the question being disassociated from the author's profile, as noted by Rob in a comment. Since that action doesn't automatically also erase the author's name from posts that quote the question being disassociated, leaving their name and link in would defeat the goal of disassociating the question.

To be clear, there's nothing stopping you from providing explicit attribution if doing so makes you feel better, but the rules about naming and linking to the author are mostly there for the much more common scenario of citing content from altogether elsewhere. Besides, again, you can't apply the rules anyway when the author is no longer available — from my post here:

If the name of the original author is unavailable (as is the case with this very help article, funnily enough), simply naming the source itself will do.

(Also notice the use of the possessive pronoun "my" to indicate that, yes, I wrote that. I didn't name myself, nor did I link to my profile, because my user card is attached to my answer and there really is no need to link to my profile more than once.)

| |
  • Thanks BoltClock, I'm in agreement. This seems to overwhelmingly represent the community's view, though I'll see if new answers arrive in the long term. – halfer Sep 25 '17 at 10:07

I'll post an answer which reflects my side of the debate, in the hope that we also acquire an answer that reflects the more strict approach.

In the comments, @BSMP helpfully links to this 2009 blog post which details Jeff Atwood's suggested approach to attribution. This looks like it was written in response to third-party websites that are taking Stack Overflow material and re-using it in way that is firmly against the spirit of guidelines.

However, I think a critical point of that article is this:

This is about the spirit of fair attribution.

I agree with this, and I'd argue - though not with much gusto or enthusiasm - that my moving the answer to where it belongs, and attributing it to the OP by way of an introductory text, is a good faith usage. This is especially the case since:

  • I post as CW, and so do not benefit from it
  • if the OP indicates they would like to repost it themselves, I let them do so, and delete my copy. Very few people have cared to do so anyway, so this does not seem to be particularly important to posters in practice.

Whilst of course this question applies to how I repost answer material, I can't imagine I am the only editor to have moved answers in this fashion. We are therefore essentially creating guidelines here for how that should be done, regardless of which editor moves the content.

| |
  • I think you should wait for a while before posting an answer, and let OP to do that himself. – Yoh Deadfall Sep 22 '17 at 20:16
  • @YohDeadfall: I'm not sure what you mean - I am the OP :-). Would you clarify? (New answers on either side are still most welcome). – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 20:17
  • I'm talking about OPs you mentioned. Give them some time to answer their questions themselves. One week would be enough. – Yoh Deadfall Sep 22 '17 at 20:27
  • 1
    @YohDeadfall: I think you've misunderstood the usage of "OP" here. It is a very general reference to any Original Poster who has incorrectly merged a self-answer into their question post; in other words, it is not a reference to a specific user. Any user who posts an answer in this way is most unlikely to read Meta, or see any value in this discussion. Thus, this is probably best answered by seasoned SO and Meta users who are familiar with the posting/legal guidelines. – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 20:32
  • 1
    No, I understand you correctly. Just do not post answers as CW too fast. Ask authors, provide the link to Help Center. If they don't repost in a week, then feel free to do that yourself. Give them a chance to learn the lesson first, educate them. Otherwise, they would think that somebody will do their job every time. – Yoh Deadfall Sep 22 '17 at 20:55
  • @YohDeadfall: aha, my apologies, I misunderstood. OK, that's an answer I didn't think about - would you post that as an answer? As I have indicated, I tried this before, but with limited success. In general the kind of user who makes this error is often the kind of user who is not given to improving their posting. That may be something of a cynical view, but it is borne out of experience! – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 20:58
  • 3
    (I would add that keeping track of a lack of replies is an extra headache that would put off most answer re-posters, probably myself included. I doubt I am the only one who would find that too much of a faff). – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 21:00
  • 1
    Use SEDE and a basic query to track them. – Yoh Deadfall Sep 22 '17 at 22:00
  • Ha, good work @Yoh! I admit that makes it a bit easier, though whether we can expect helpful answer-moving editors to know about the availability of such tools is another matter. It's probably worth my pointing out that the extraction of the answer material is sometimes not straight-forward, given that some inexperienced OPs can sometimes meld Qs and As in highly inventive ways. Thus, the extraction can already be onerous without deciding to add new steps to the process. – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 22:03
  • Thanks @YohDeadfall. Doing the same as halfer, I often also use data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/715600/… – Cœur Sep 24 '17 at 9:09

Stack Overflow Attribution Rules

I think minimally rule 4 should apply here:


First, doing it this way keeps attribution consistent with the existing rule and how it would be done on the site if you were attributing text from a Stack Overflow post elsewhere on the site.

Secondly, it is possible for the OP's name to be removed from the question, either by being made a community wiki or the account being deleted. If the user's name is removed then it is not longer clear who the OP is.

As for the other changes, even if the revision link and quote formatting isn't required I don't think your text is sufficient:

Posted solution on behalf of OP

It says you're posting a solution for the OP but it is not clear from this (at least not as clear as it could be) that you are quoting the OP or that the solution was originally posted as part of the question. If you aren't going to include a link or quote formatting the note should at least say:

Posted solution written by OP Name, originally posted as part of their question

This way users know you're quoting the OP and that they can find the original text in the revision history.

| |
  • Marvellous, that great BSMP. Let's see what responses we get. – halfer Sep 22 '17 at 22:33
  • 8
    'If the user's name is removed then it is not longer clear who the OP is'. If a user is deleted, a hyperlink to their profile doesn't help at all in this case. I'm not sure about the legal ramifications, but account deletion has already removed attribution of content (the question) from the user. If a user is explicitly disassociated with the post, the link may even be detrimental. – Rob Sep 23 '17 at 2:15
  • @Rob I doubt you can fully disassociate with content posted under the current license. If the answer has been obtained under our CC BY SA license, it will stay licensed that way. Attribution will stay required, even if the original source tries to disassociate from that answer. It's truly hard to get rid of open source licenses, once you licensed it, you can't un-license it. You can. as author, ask to be explicitly disassociated from a derivative work, as outlined here – Erik A Sep 23 '17 at 11:10
  • More specific link (very long, url shorteners aren't allowed) – Erik A Sep 23 '17 at 11:15
  • 1
    I'm up-voting with the condition that "the author" should be used in place of author's name; (username or otherwise, should not be included.) Whatever the licensing requirements are they are included in the question and question has the same content in it's entirety, (which includes all revisions.) Therefore a fallback should be preferred; (in spirit of respecting OP's privacy and reducing administrative burden;) even if question does not properly adhere to licensing requirements, (in which case the question itself or behavior of SO should be updated.) – Pooyan Khosravi Sep 25 '17 at 9:08

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .